[Asterisk-Users] RE: Business Edition

[Kevin Walsh]

Lee Howard [faxguy at howardsilvan.com] wrote:
> Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> > You seem to be neglecting the amount of work that Digium puts into the
> > Asterisk (and related) products on an ongoing basis that is given to
> > the community at no charge.
> > 
> So at least we agree, then, on what the reasoning is.  Digium feels that
> the community owes it to them.
> 
I agree with that assessment.

It has been flippantly said, a number of times, that "if you don't
like the situation then you can fork the project."  A major fork seems
(to me) to be pointless for one main reason (and a couple of lesser
reasons):

As I see it, anyone working on an Asterisk fork who had previously
signed the dangerous "disclaimer" (the perpetual one) could find their
changes to the fork rolled back into the Asterisk Binary Edition
without any further permission being required.

The perpetual agreement grants "the owner" a "non-cancellable right
to use changes and/or enhancements" made to the Asterisk codebase "as
[the] owner sees fit."  As any Asterisk fork would, of course, be based
upon existing Asterisk code, "the owner" would have the automatic right
to take any code they wanted and backport it into the Asterisk Binary
Edition - as long as the contributor to the fork had previously signed
a perpetual "disclaimer" at some point in the past.

A fork wouldn't get very far without the support of at least some of
the regular contributors, all of whom have probably signed the
perpetual agreement.  For this reason, I believe that if a fork were
ever necessary, it would struggle to beat a distinct path away from
the Asterisk Binary Edition, which would be free to assimilate any
advances into its own codebase.

To mitigate the above, I believe that the perpetual disclaimer should
be modified to cover only a specific time period (i.e. one year from
the date of submission).  All contributions made within that time
period would be covered by the currently-valid agreement, and that
agreement could be renewed annually, if desired.  I don't see that
sort of change happening anytime soon because I believe that the
perpetual nature of the agreement is quite deliberate.

I think people sign agreements out of convenience, or pressure,
without reading carefully enough.  For instance, I wonder how many
people actually received their "$1.00 (One Dollar) and other good and
valuable consideration" when they signed their future options away.

-- 
   _/   _/  _/_/_/_/  _/    _/  _/_/_/  _/    _/
  _/_/_/   _/_/      _/    _/    _/    _/_/  _/   K e v i n   W a l s h
 _/ _/    _/          _/ _/     _/    _/  _/_/    kevin at cursor.biz
_/   _/  _/_/_/_/      _/    _/_/_/  _/    _/